Why are there more people failing in affiliate marketing than succeeding in them? The answer lies in these people making too many common mistakes. Mistakes that can be avoided.

1. Choosing a Wrong Niche

One of the top mistakes made by new affiliate marketers is insufficient research on which niche market to target or they simply don’t know what targeting a niche really means.

Keyword research is good but may be incomplete, as although it tells you information about the market and how it breaks down to niches, it still does not paint a full picture. One good way is to read up top selling books and magazines targeted to your intended niche to understand who these customers are and what solutions they are searching for.

2. No Subscribers List

As they say ‘the money is in the list’ so building a list is an essential part of any affiliate marketing campaign. Do ensure that you have a lead capture system like a landing page that provides a free eBook or anything that will benefit your visitors. To build this list effectively, you will also need an auto-responder to manage these contacts automatically.

While building a list is very important, it takes a long time to grow your subscribers list. Many a times, marketers who find such efforts too time consuming will just give up either having a list or the business entirely. The successful marketer who believes the power of a list will never quit and continue to build it.

3. Not Generating Enough Traffic

Another common mistake new affiliate marketers make is not doing enough to generate traffic. It’s not enough to put up a few banners or affiliate links or write a few articles. Remember that getting organic search engine will ultimately generate lots of free targeted traffic to your website.

You also need to follow a daily marketing plan and follow it consistently including PPC marketing campaigns, link building, blogging article submission, press release just to name a few.

The delicious candy play is just too tempting to resist when our brains need a little break from our daily marketing routine. But upon closer look, we realized that good marketing – and good social media marketing, at that – is really everywhere a successful business is. Candy Crush and its developer, King, by extension are no different. If anything a closer examination as to just why people of all ages, nationalities and tech levels are just so completely consumed by this easy game that – let’s be honest – looks like another version of the classic Bejeweled reveals this simple fact: Candy Crush saga is a true social media marketing genius. And here’s why:

Why We’re Still Playing
There are a few reasons first to consider why it is that we are still playing this game so arduously almost a year after it launched in November 2012 when so many other games reach their peak well before that time. Thinkgaming data estimates that there are a cool 8.8 million active users playing Candy Crush everyday bringing in more than an estimate $858,000 in revenue – daily! That is a a lot of money for an app that you can download for free. And what’s more? An estimated 77,776 players are installing the game daily. Let’s consider five important reasons why Candy Crush is still the number one grossing app.

In-App Purchases: Candy Crush Saga is considered a “freemium” app because although free to download a player can easily spend small amounts of money quickly to buy boosters or lives to advance through the game. Players are estimated to spend an average of $2.84 a day on in-app purchases!

Simple Gameplay: Candy Crush, loosely put, is a spawn off the classic Bejeweled. The object of the game is simple enough that anyone can get started and start playing. There aren’t tons of rules or features to learn, meaning gameplay is also fast and continuous.

Forced Breaks: One of the genius rules that the developers did incorporate into Candy Crush is that once you’re out of lives, you have to wait for your lives to reload – meaning you have to wait to play. Unlike other hugely popular games with all aforementioned features like Temple Run, for example, players can quickly burn out and get bored after playing for hours. Making players wait means they come back excited and anxious for more.

Endless Milestones: With almost every new update, King has added hundreds of new levels to Candy Crush so that now there are 500 levels to play, meaning there is always the satisfaction of making it to the next milestone. Again, games like Temple Run have players only beating their own scores – which can get boring and repetitive. Another insanely popular game most will remember, Angry Birds, made players pay for levels after a certain level. Candy Crush offers a happy solution to both game fads.

Multi-Platform Functionality: Nowadays people want to take everything with them without limitations. Candy Crush allows you to pick up your progress whether you’re playing on your phone, computer or tablet – and it’s available for iOS and Android users. No restrictions here!

The Social Media Marketing Element
Now here is the kicker that really seems to bring the success of Candy Crush home: the strategic use of social media in its gameplay. It is this one insanely important tool that King integrated all over the place that seems to really have driven up the numbers for downloads, active users and even revenue – and kept them rising for the last year. Let’s take a look.

Facebook Integration: We all love convenience, and King knew that – which is why they allow you to start playing by signing in through Facebook. And once you do, you can see all your friends who are also playing and where they are on the levels map. What’s more is that you can check out their scores, so the fun of beating levels becomes more exciting when you start beating your friends.

Lifesaving Friends: When you’ve burned out all your lives playing that one level you just can’t beat, you can either spend the money buying those lives and boosters (and some people obviously do by the those numbers), wait it out for 30 minutes, or you can have your friends give you an extra life. This requires active involvement from your friends. But if you’re depending on them, they’re also depending on you and now you’ve got a well-integrated cycle of dependency that’s all tied in by the use of social media.

Friends in High Places: Probably the smartest feature of all is the fact that at certain points of the game, to reach a new episode, you have to request “tickets” from at least 3 of your Facebook friends to move forward. The dependence on your friends through Facebook keeps social media at the heart of Candy Crush’s success.

Active Social Media Community: Some of the levels in Candy Crush are hard – and King knows that. The addictive play can get a little frustrating when you’ve been on the same level for months, but luckily there’s a community of more than 51.3 million people just on candy crush’s Facebook page that are giving each other tips and helping fellow players through the hard times. Disguising clever social media marketing as a forum? Absolutely genius.

Tell us, do you play Candy Crush Saga during your free time? Are you impressed by how clever King was to use social media to skyrocket their success?

Are you having a tough time escaping the “rat race”? Is corporate America not paying you enough money to live the illustrious life that you want to live? If you answered “yes” to both of these questions, then you should know that the best way that to get out of both of these situations is with a job.

Now I’m sure you’ve probably heard of multiple ways to start your own business. If you’ve decided to start an internet business, and like the idea of affiliate marketing, this is a good avenue to take up. But there are some limitations to affiliate marketing, and before you can sell anything, you need to know how to get tons of people in front of your affiliate site.

To do this, you need website traffic. Website traffic is something that a lot of beginners to internet marketing don’t know how to do. They buy product after product looking for the big “Holy Grail” of traffic generation, without knowing that all you need to do is follow a simple daily marketing regimen.

Now if you stick with the tips in today’s lesson, you should be getting website traffic simply and easily. It’s not hard to do, it just requires patience and persistence. In fact, let’s take a look at the first traffic strategy that you can use to boost your online sales and profits in your business:

1) Viral marketing

There are all kinds of forms of viral marketing. You have the eBook viral marketing strategy, the video viral marketing strategy, and even the “refer a friend” viral marketing strategy. All of these strategies work very well, and you should be using at least one of them in your business today.

The best viral strategy that I like is the free eBook strategy. With this strategy, you can to embed product and affiliate links into your eBook, and earn sales from it whenever someone clicks through and buy from any one of your links. To turn it viral, on the title page of your eBook, tell your reader that they have your permission to distribute your free eBook on their website – and all across the internet. Here’s another traffic strategy that you can do:

2) PPC

PPC or pay per click advertising is a favorite amongst many online marketers. You get traffic quickly and easily, and you can get sales within a matter of hours depending on your advertising budget and cost per click. Typically the higher your cost per click, the more traffic you will get.

The premier PPC company on the internet is Google AdWords. There are many books on this service by Google, and a lot of them have lots of good information in it. When you use AdWords, just make sure that you’re making a profit, or at least breaking even. If you’re just starting out, you have no idea of what the average lifetime value of a customer is. So until you can figure out this number, remain cautious with your PPC advertising campaign.

Both of these traffic strategies are excellent for getting you more sales and profits on a daily basis. The more you work on both of them, the more traffic you will stand to get, and the more opt-in subscribers you will get… which will then result in sales. So use these techniques today.